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Technology is a false god, unlikely to do much for children unless schools focus on learning and make huge investments in professional development.

The question is one of purpose and skill

new technologies only improve learning when a school makes professional development a priority

Instead, students should be learning note-taking as a way of organizing data and curating information they need for a defined purpose.  Students should sift and cull, summarize and synthesize. Students should learn how to take notes in ways that correlate with real-life situations. Finally, students should master the skill of making meaning from their notes and finding the best ways to share that meaning with others.

When does our note-taking have a real purpose? When we are collecting field notes, listening to a webinar or YouTube training video, scanning a book for nuggets of wisdom. When we attend workshops or conferences, or even when we meet someone for a networking lunch.

What are the actual skills students need in order to organize the vast amounts of information they must cull through to make meaning and solve problems? Is note-taking from the Internet, from Twitter, or from texts really a different kind of animal? Won’t students buy into the note-taking process if they understand that it matters for something more than spitting back a professor’s lecture notes that haven’t changed in the last twenty years?

Traditional professional development, however—the kind in which teachers attend a one-time workshop or conference to learn a new teaching method, for example—hasn't provided much help in bringing her classroom into the 21st century.

That reality needs to change,

focus, with razor-sharp attention, on what students need to learn, rather than on how to use a specific device.

Students live and will work in an increasingly highly connected and collaborative world, and we have to understand what this means for learning, working, and living in order to provide a more personal, self-directed and more effective learning environment for the students.

Increased exposure to more diverse ideas, learning experiences and techniques. Increased networking which helps educators to know other educators and their practices across the world. It provides educators with opportunities to collaborate on a variety of research, projects, techniques for teaching and more. It allows educators to stay up to date with all the current things happening in educational organizations all over the world. Educators can easily learn about the best practices for teaching globally and share them with others. It keeps their literacy flowing and evolving on the tools of 21st century . Educators can make their students experience high-quality virtual classes (with MOOCs) and blended classes where learning occurs even outside the schools. Through this educators can make masses of people understand the relevance of education that students are receiving presently and how they can make positive amends to it.